Anna Paquin walks into a bar. It’s a murky hipster joint on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Time passes, drinks are consumed, and the 23-year-old star is eventually spotted by a nearby group of male movie fans. “She’s, like, Rogue from X-Men,” they whisper together. “The one with the telekinetic power to kill on contact!” Moments later and right on cue, the group leader, puffed and preened, slides over to Paquin’s table. “So,” he says, with softly seductive bedroom eyes, “If I touch you, will I die?” Paquin cuts him cold, freezes him with a glance, and hisses, “Yes. But not in the way you think!”

“If I never hear another Rogue pick-up line it won’t be soon enough,” sighs a mock-despondent Paquin today. She’s ruminating on the bi-products of fame, the unexpected side effects of starring in a monster movie franchise phenomenon like X-Men, and the havoc it can play on your social life. Drifting between major bemusement and minor irritation, the former button-cute child star and pre-teen Oscar winner (see her tempestuous debut in The Piano) can’t quite conceive of herself as bona fide bar bait. And yes, she was a swivel-hipped snakeskin seductress in Spike Lee’s The 25th Hour, she brought mop-topped Patrick Fugit down to his skivvies in Almost Famous, and turned Sean Penn to jelly in Hurlyburly. But she’s over that whole nymphet thing now, she says. It was just a phase. “There’s a lot of those nymphet parts around – they’re always interesting to play, but I dunno what it says about the film industry!” (More later.)

And as if to prove a point, her new movie The Squid And The Whale sees former Columbia University student Paquin playing her age and to her strengths as a New York college student who insinuates her way into the lives of her English teacher and his awkward teenage son. She follows it with playwright-turned-director Kenneth Lonergan’s Margaret, a dark and witty fable about a woman (Paquin) burdened with guilt after unintentionally causing a bus crash. She’s even joined the grown-up world of movie-minded honchos by forming her own production company with her brother, to produce and star in her own hand-picked projects. Added to which landmarks of maturation, she hasn’t even been ‘carded’ in a full six months. “It just stopped. It means I can go out to a bar or anywhere without being asked of ID. It hasn’t happened since last year, when I went to see Garden State! I went by myself – Yes, I am a big loser! – It was a Wednesday afternoon and they told me that I should be at school. I was like, ‘I’m sorry, but I’m 22!’”

It’s strange, that, about Anna Paquin. The headlong rush to pile on the years – to be seen, and to be regarded, as old, or at least older. It’s almost willfully perverse within an industry that measures star wattage by the contrary ability to somehow become more glamorous and even younger-looking with each successive movie. And yet, with Paquin it’s different. As a child star, and an Oscar-winning one to boot, she has the egregious ghosts of Shirley Temple, Tatum O’Neil and Macaulay Culkin breathing down her neck. Accumulating years isn’t just an affection; it’s a careerist mark of survival. Hence, her celebrated Oscar win is often given short conversational shrift. “It’s like, OK, that’s awesome, that happened,” she says. “But like there’s more to my career than something happened 14 or 15 years ago. How long can you keep being wowed by that?”

Similarly, occasionally dismissive remarks about her childhood career – as a young New Zealand schoolgirl she only went to The Piano audition to get time off class – can be miscontrued ast the words of someone who is casual to the point of insouciance about her craft. Whereas in fact, she confesses, quietly, the opposite is true. “Quite frankly, it’s the most personal thing that I do. For someone who’s kinda shy it’s incredible to be bare on film.”

Back in the day, she followed The Piano with Jane Eyre and Fly Away Home. In both of these films she still that little girl, that truculent New Zealander with the imperishable accent, the brooding baby forehead frown, and the two great white Bugs Bunny teeth – separated by a giant gap, constantly hidden by an unsmiling mouth. “I think a lot of people misconstrue a neutral facial expression for being one of dissatisfaction,” she muses. “If you’re not someone whose default expression is to be smiley, people somehow interpret that as kind of negative.”

Paquin grew up on camera. The teen years kicked in, the hormones too. But the searing cultural memory of the pre-teen Paquin breathlessly gripping her Oscar, or in curious character, examining The Piano’s Harvey Keitel with a gentle head tilt, or screaming defiance to co-star Sam Neil in the same proved hard to overshadow. And certainly, during the aforementioned nymphet years there was an unspoken and frankly queasy undercurrent to the speed at which Paquin had been embraced by the industry as an underage temptress. She became the go-to-girl for horny older men characters, like Philip Seymour Hoffman in The 25th Hour. Even the morally simplistic X-Men thrilled with the erotic charge created by mercilessly rubbing the adolescent Paquin up against grizzly middle-aged predator Wolverine (Hugh Jackman). In several scenes blatant sexual metaphor mixes freely with the surface drama i.e. Rogue sneaks into Wolverine’s bedroom at night, in a clingy white number, only to be brutally impaled on the sweaty man-beast’s, er, spikes. She saves herself from certain death by ahem, sucking the healing power out of him.

“That’s a pretty literal interpretation, I think,” defends Paquin, with a sanguine air of resignation. “There’s more, er abstract levels that the metaphor can work on, like how the turmoil of adolescence can be isolating. And as for the nymphet thing, well maybe it looked a pretty drastic step for people who remember me being nine years old. And suddenly, I’m wearing half an outfit and flirting with Sean Penn. But, ya know, I did actually hit puberty, and I did actually cease to be a 12-year-old girl! It’s like what happens to most little girls – you’re just not a little girl anymore.”

These days the Bugs Bunny teeth have settled down, and the smiled more readily available. She lives in New York now, near the East Village, in a small apartment with an even smaller kitchen (“I order a lot of takeouts”). She tried college for a year, and loved it, the best fun she’d had in, like, forever. Not doing movies, and just hanging out. But after a while, it was like, “So, OK, I’ve gone through the whole academic school thing, I’ve got the right grades, I’m here and yes I’ve had a blast. But, you know what? I really like my job, and this isn’t necessarily the right place for me to be right now.”

She has a boyfriend too, but she’d rather not talk about him – “I’m flattered that you ask, but I do not wish to proceed any further on that.” She has a storage unit, where she keeps everything that she can’t fit in her tiny apartment, including a box of Rogue Action Figures.

Naturally, she’s back again this summer, in life-sucking mode in X-Men: The Last Stand. This time Rogue, appropriately enough, is older and wise, without a touch of adolescent angst, and sporting an even larger shock of snow white hair to prove it.

And as for the future? After doing several plays off Broadway, including Neil LaBute’s The Distance From Here, as well as Lonergan’s This Is Our Youth in London’s West End, she feels that she’s got a lifetime’s worth of heavyweight screen acting ahead of her. Although, courtesy of The Piano, she was also recently named 7th greatest child actor of all time by Blockbuster Video – below Jodie Foster, but just above Drew Barrymore.

“Well I hope I have my best performances still to come,” she shrugs. “I hope I didn’t peak at nine! I mean, fuck!”

Source: i-D Magazine / By Kevin Maher / Transcribed by Crystal for Anna Paquin Online